Science held a place of prominence within the foreign relations of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its founding in 1949 onward. It remained a consistent feature across the dramatic strategic pivots and realignments which transformed the PRC’s international position through multiple phases of the Global Cold War, from its early years of alliance with ‘big brother’, the Soviet Union, through subsequent fierce competition for influence in ‘communist’ and ‘developing’ worlds accompanying the Sino-Soviet split, as well as the later re-orientations and expansions catalysed by entry into the United Nations and rapprochement with the United States. Considering cases from each period, this paper will analyse the nature of the PRC’s foreign scientific relations across these phases, and in relation to the range of international actors associated with each one. Ideological currents, international influences, and domestic political developments all contributed to shaping not just changes but also key continuities in the policies, strategies, and discourses about ‘Chinese science’ in the context of the Global Cold War.

This paper examines a particular case-study of 1960s American political high-modernism within the context of the Cold War, American social unrest, and transnational currents of thought on the transformative potential of digital information technologies. In 1967, physicist and U.S. deputy national science advisor Nicholas Golovin conceived in his White House office a radical proposal for a fourth branch of the United States government: an evaluative, or “systems” branch, that would serve the direct interests of the American people by supplying computer-generated data and analysis to the other three branches of government.

Circulating his proposal first through correspondence with scientific expert peers, then through white papers to learned societies, then through publications targeted at policymakers and Washington thought leaders, Golovin championed a technocratic restructuring of American governmental operations based on “rational” data collection and analysis. Responding both to Cold War fears of America falling behind geopolitical rivals and apprehension over Sixties domestic unrest and social inequality, Golovin advocated “constitutionalizing” science – bringing absolute truth to policy design and implementation via overt embrace of “neutral” mainframe computers. Space Age science would provide the template for restructuring U.S. government, allowing advanced technological systems to bring order to unruly social systems.

This paper draws on Golovin’s papers, period publications, and archival analysis of correspondence and speeches from a network of key Cold War scientists and policymakers to trace the discourse of high modernist rationality as physicists, computer engineers, journalists, business leaders, and elected officials encountered and debated Golovin’s proposition.

When–and how–did concerns about global vulnerability and sustainability first take modern form? Several influences from the 1950s and 1960s are clear: killer smogs, oil spills, radioactive fallout, the 1968 Apollo “Earthrise” photograph. Far less well known were secret high-level discussions among leaders in the Kennedy White House about what Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner had termed “the problem of large-scale experimentation with possible environmental effects.” Administration officials were aware of emerging plans for weather modification, the placing of tiny reflective needles in low-earth orbit to aid military communications, test nuclear explosions in near-earth space, and deliberate massive fish kills in the Colorado River. Those with whom they shared these plans reacted in alarm. The earth scientist Lloyd V. Berkner, a key architect of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, declared that the U.S. government needed to adopt policies to avoid “real damage to science” and “real damage to the human environment.” Robert S. Morison, the influential director of natural science programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, was blunter still. “The unilateral exercise of the power to alter our common environment raises moral and ethical questions of the greatest gravity,” he asserted, continuing: “In some as not yet very well defined sense, it is beginning to be recognized that individuals and societies have ‘rights’ to what might be called the historical ecology of the region they inhabit.” Such proposals put faith in high modernity on trial–and threatened long-standing American advantages in the power positions of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.